The Military Occupied LA for 40 Days and All They Got Was This One Arrest

Thousands of federal troops have been deployed to Los Angeles since June 7 on the orders of President Donald Trump. In the first 40 days of this military operation on U.S. soil, they have done vanishingly close to nothing. The more than 5,000 National Guard soldiers and Marines who have operated in Southern California — under the command of the Army’s Task Force 51 — were sent to “protect the safety and security of federal functions, personnel, and property.” In practice, this has mostly meant guarding federal buildings across LA from protests against the ongoing Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids sweeping the city. Since Trump called up the troops on June 7, they have carried out exactly one temporary detainment, a Task Force 51 spokesperson told The Intercept. On Tuesday, Trump administration officials announced that about 2,000 troops deployed to LA would be released. Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell described this action-packed deployment as Task Force 51 supporting “more than 170 missions in over 130 separate locations from nine federal agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Agency, the US Marshal Service, ICE and the Department of Homeland Security” in a briefing in early July. Task Force 51 failed to provide any other metrics regarding troops’ involvement in raids, arrests, or street patrols in response to questions by The Intercept. “The militarization of Los Angeles and the deployment of nearly 5,000 soldiers is completely unnecessary.” The deployments are expected to cost the public hundreds of millions of dollars. Troops were sent to LA over the objections of local officials and California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Officials and experts decried the show of military force to counter overwhelmingly peaceful and relatively limited protests as a dangerous abuse of power and a misuse of federal funds. “We’ve said it time and again since day one, the militarization of Los Angeles and the deployment of nearly 5,000 soldiers is completely unnecessary and done out of pure theater,” Diana Crofts-Pelayo, Newsom’s deputy director of communications, told The Intercept, referencing the president and a top aide and the architect of his anti-immigrant agenda. “Trump and Stephen Miller are to blame here — they are creating their own chaos, military escalation, and tearing up hardworking families with their indiscriminate raids.” The directive signed by Trump, calling up the California National Guard, cited “10 U.S.C. 12406,” a provision within Title 10 of the U.S. Code on Armed Services that allows the federal deployment of National Guard forces if “there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.” This weekend, Vice President J.D. Vance was vacationing at Disneyland in Anaheim, California, about 25 miles from LA, the city supposedly still in or on the verge of rebellion. “If the region was such a threat that Trump felt the need to deploy the military against its own citizens, why has the Vice President visited the area twice over the past several weeks, including taking his family to Disneyland this past weekend?” asked Crofts-Pelayo. In addition to guarding federal buildings, troops have also recently participated in raids alongside camouflage-clad ICE agents. An assault on MacArthur Park, a recreational hub in one of Los Angeles’s most immigrant-heavy neighborhoods on July 7, for example, included 90 armed U.S. troops and 17 military Humvees. Its main accomplishment was rousting a summer day camp for children. No arrests were made. “To have armored vehicles deployed on the streets of our city, to federalize the National Guard, to have the U.S. Marines who are trained to kill abroad, deployed to our city — all of this is outrageous and it is un-American,” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass announced in the wake of the joint ICE-military operation. “It’s clear that this is all part of a political agenda to terrorize immigrants and signal that they need to stay at home when there are entire sectors of our economy that rely on immigrant workers.”  Read our complete coverage Chilling Dissent During the MacArthur Park raid, codenamed Operation Excalibur, the military was to provide “static interagency site protection” and “mounted mobile security” according to leaked materials exposed by former Intercept reporter Ken Klippenstein who said that the “planning went bust.”    California National Guard soldiers also backed ICE raids on state-licensed marijuana nurseries last week. The troops took part in the military-style assaults on two locations, one in the Santa Barbara County town of Carpinteria, about 90 miles northwest of Los Angeles, and one in the Ventura County community of Camarillo, about 50 miles from L.A. ICE detained more than 200 people, including U.S. citizens, during the joint operations. One man, Jaime Alanís Garcia, died due to the raid in Camarillo. The One Arrest After calling up the National Guard on June 7, the Trump administration went further, as Northern Command activated 700 Marines from the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, 1st Marine Division and sent them to Los Angeles. On July 1, Task Force 51 announced that it would release approximately 150 members of the California National Guard from their LA duty. That same day, NORTHCOM said that the 2/7 Marines were leaving Los Angeles but would be replaced by the 3rd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment. All told, there are still 4,700 troops operating under Title 10 in Los Angeles, consisting of approximately 4,000 National Guard Soldiers and 700 Marines, according to Army North. Since the deployments began, around 5,500 troops, in total, have been sent to LA, according to Becky Farmer, a NORTHCOM spokesperson.   “Title 10 forces have been involved in one temporary detainment until the individual could be safely transferred.” A spokesperson for Task Force 51 told The Intercept that, in Los Angeles, “Title 10 forces have been involved in one temporary detainment until the individual could be safely transferred to federal law enforcement.” The lone detention was reportedly conducted by Marines sent to guard the Wilshire Federal Building, a 17-story office building on Wilshire Boulevard in LA. Video of the incident shows Marines in full combat gear and automatic weapons zip-tying an unresisting man — clad in shorts, a T-shirt, and sunglasses — on the ground. At one point, the detainee, with his hands bound behind him, is surrounded by no fewer than six Marines and two other officials who appear to be federal security guards.   The man, Marcos Leao, was not involved in any protest. The former Army combat engineer, who gained U.S. citizenship through his military service, told Reuters that he was in a rush to get to an appointment in the Veterans Affairs office inside the Federal Building. When he crossed a strand of caution tape, he found an armed Marine sprinting toward him. For weeks, U.S. Army North has not responded to requests for additional information about the incident. The Path to a Police State A federal judge in California on Friday blocked the Trump administration from “indiscriminately” arresting people, saying that it had likely broken the law by dispatching “roving patrols” of agents to carry out mass arrests. Two temporary restraining orders issued by Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California directed the government to stop racial profiling as part of its immigration crackdown. In her 52-page ruling, Frimpong declared that the government “may not rely solely, alone or in combination,” on race or ethnicity; on a person speaking Spanish or English with an accent; or the type of work performed to establish reasonable suspicion to stop and detain people. “What the federal government would have this Court believe — in the face of a mountain of evidence presented in this case — is that none of this is actually happening,” Frimpong wrote. While federal troops, including Marines from Camp Pendleton in California, are ostensibly protecting ICE agents in Los Angeles, ICE agents are now involved in protecting Marines at Camp Pendleton as well as those at Marine Corps bases in Quantico, Virginia, and in Hawaii, as part of a pilot program also involving U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. ICE agents are now involved with “identity verification and access screening operations” at Camp Pendleton in order “to deter unauthorized installation access by foreign nationals.” The overlapping missions of military forces and civilian law enforcement in the U.S. have blurred lines, sown confusion, and pushed the U.S. further down the path of becoming a police state. Task Force 51 stresses that troops serving under Title 10 duty “are not authorized to directly participate in law enforcement activities,” although they “may temporarily detain an individual for protection purposes — to stop an assault of, to prevent harm to, or to prevent interference with federal personnel performing their duties.” Some troops have voiced trepidation about their deployment. Little-noticed interviews with soldiers serving in Los Angeles, published by the military itself, offer a glimpse of apprehension among Guardsmen sent to quell protests in the city.   “At first it was a little scary not knowing what I’m jumping into,” said Specialist Nadia Cano of the California Army National Guard in late June, noting troops were “doing training possibly to be on mission with law enforcement and other federal government agencies.”   At about the same time, Private First Class Andrew Oliveira, also of the Guard, began his interview with a military reporter with a statement that spoke to his state of unease. “I think we all feel a little bit anxious about why we’re here,” he said. Experts say that the introduction of military troops into civilian law enforcement support further strains civil-military relations and risks violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, a bedrock 19th-century law seen as fundamental to the democratic tradition in America. The Posse Comitatus Act bars federal troops from participating in civilian law enforcement.  The post The Military Occupied LA for 40 Days and All They Got Was This One Arrest appeared first on The Intercept.